Pff, tour writes in that PDF on his website:
I differ strongly, and I think the synthetic chemist can be the most skeptical because we know what molecules do and do not do in an abiological environment.
This is tantamount to claiming that experiments are unnecessary because Tour can say what the results will be before even doing the experiment.
Why do chemists ever perform experiments? We can just ask James Tour, much cheaper.
He also writes:
This is not to say that Sutherland has not realized the problems associated with this multistep approach to building intermediates. He does discuss it in his 2015 “Common origins…” paper, and more recently in his 2018 paper on “Mimicking the surface and prebiotic chemistry…” DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04147-2 So to address this, he tries to make these compounds in a one-pot (simulating one puddle or steam flow, I suppose) approach.
No, it’s not purported to be a puddle, which Tour would know if he read the actual article he cites, which says:
“Considering a landscape, distinct areas could have been rich in NaCN deposits or CaNCN deposits, based purely on the differences of abundance of Na+ and Ca2+ ions in those regions at the time of evaporation of water before thermal metamorphosis. At a later juncture, after rainfall, streams or rivulets could start to flow, picking up substrates, reagents and catalysts in a sequence determined by the order in which the dry-state repositories were encountered. Photochemistry and dehydration/hydration steps could ensue, and upon confluence of the streams mixing and further reaction could take place. This geochemical situation would offer the type of mechanism required for sequential delivery of reagents to allow constructive and selective synthesis of all the (proto)biomolecules previously reported26. There are numerous variations to this scheme, for example, fluvial activity could bring the reagents from different areas to merge in a pool. The pool could undergo drying and rehydration and occasionally, in heavy rain, overflow, mixing the contents with other pools. Although all the required chemical steps had been demonstrated by us in the laboratory, some were still sceptical that the prebiotic relevance of the scheme was not warranted as “the network cannot yet function in one pot without external interference”36. Notwithstanding the fact that the scheme is not meant to function in one pot, we wondered how we could best simulate the fluvial locale we envisaged without a hands-on approach. Below, we describe an uninterrupted synthesis of 2-aminooxazole from prebiotically plausible starting materials in an attempt to validate the plausibility of our geochemical scenario and the permissible prebiotic chemistry associated with that scenario. We found that bisulfite is an excellent all-round player, providing reducing power for the reduction of nitriles to aldehydes and the capacity to protect and concentrate the aldehydes, and therefore prebiotic amino acid and ribonucleotide precursors, yet, vitally, does not interfere with their syntheses.”
Notice reference 26, where Sutherland and colleagues first describe this geological scenario, not meant to be just one “puddle”. Therein we find this figure:
Chemistry in a post meteoritic impact scenarioA series of post impact environmental events are shown along with chemistry (boxed) proposed to occur as a consequence of those events.
a . Dissolution of atmospherically produced hydrogen cyanide results in conversion of vivianite – the anoxic corrosion product of the meteoritic inclusion schreibersite – into mixed ferrocyanide salts and phosphate salts, counter cations being provided through neutralisation and ion-exchange reactions with bedrock and other meteoritic oxides and salts.
b . Partial evaporation results in the deposition of the least soluble salts over a wide area, further evaporation deposits the most soluble salts in smaller, lower lying areas.
c . After complete evaporation, impact or geothermal heating results in thermal metamorphosis of the evaporite layer, and generation of feedstock precursor salts.
d . Upper. Rainfall on higher ground leads to rivulets or streams that flow downhill sequentially leaching feedstocks from the thermally metamorphosed evaporite layer. Solar irradiation drives photoredox chemistry in the streams. Lower. Convergent synthesis can result when streams with different reaction histories merge, as illustrated here for the potential synthesis of arabinose aminooxazoline 5 at the confluence of two streams that contained glycolaldehyde 1 , and leached different feedstocks before merging.
As anyone who isn’t blind or cognitively challenged can see, this isn’t supposed to be a “puddle” with everything taking place simultaneously in one pot. That looks like the sort of environment one would actually expect to have existed sometime around the late heavy bombardment.